Movie Reviews & Interviews from Washington

Jason Bourne is arguably Matt Damon’s best role. Damon did a beautiful job carrying all three films of the trilogy from start to finish. When we have an epic action star like this in the lead role, it’s especially difficult to reboot the series with a different lead actor taking charge.

“The Bourne Legacy”, directed by the Bourne trilogy screenwriter Tony Gilroy, opens with Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner) in the snowy mountains of Alaska on a solo training mission. Cross is a super trained assassin of “Operation Outcome,” the third generation of the Treadstone operation.

Aaron completes his mission and heads to the operation’s safe house with a fellow member of the program (Oscar Isaac). The next day, Aaron hears a faint buzzing noise in the sky and goes outside to check it out, that’s when the missile hits and the house is blown to pieces with Outcome #3 inside.

When Aaron realizes that the higher-ups are killing everyone in the program off, including fellow assassins and doctors, he finds Dr. Marta Shearing (Rachel Weisz), a doctor who assists in developing the super-charger pills the assassins take to buff them up.

It’s Col. Eric Byer’s (the amazing Edward Norton) job to shut everything about the Treadstone program down. Of course, he thinks that Cross is dead. But to his surprise, when he and his team start looking for Dr. Shearing in airport security tapes, Cross pops up alongside her, both of them fleeing the country.

Yes, the plot is a bit confusing and that’s not even all of what’s going on. But if you’re familiar with the Bourne films, you know how fast paced they are.

Renner does a fine job carrying the film and I was impressed with his performance in the franchise reboot. It proves that there is still a story to tell post Jason Bourne. Earlier this year, Renner played Hawkeye in “Marvel’s The Avengers,” and despite that it’s one of the best action movies of the year, I wasn’t a fan of his work in the film.

I’m really like the story, even without Jason Bourne, the script isn’t up to par with the original Bourne films, but its decent.

Where the movie takes a completely wrong turn is its climatic scene and ending. After the “climatic scene” was over with, I felt that I needed another action scene to complete the film. And to make matters worse, the ending is terrible. When the music for the credits came on I said out loud, “Really…that was it?” If the point of that ending was to try and build up for another movie, it failed because we needed this movie to come full circle.

Renner’s performance is excellent and I can see him and Matt Damon bouncing off of each other in the next movie, if there is one. But every true Bourne fan will most likely be disappointed with the ending of “Legacy.”